Iggy Pop And The Stooges And The Seven Dwarfs
Ron Howard has a face made for punching, rider notes
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Iggy and the Stooges
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SEPTEMBER 28--When TSG first published excerpts from Iggy Pop’s tour rider six years ago, we called the document “the single most entertaining concert rider” we had ever seen.
Since then, the Foo Fighters upped the ante by producing a rider complete with an innovative “Field Guide To Food Coloring Book And Activity Pages.” In fact, the group’s rider is held in such esteem that it has actually been plagiarized by at least one lesser band.
So back to Iggy, who next appears with the Stooges on October 14 in Austin, Texas.
The 65-year-old performer’s current tour rider--again authored by stage manager Jos Grain--is stocked with risqué jokes, ribald observations, and oddball riffs. While Grain has reprised some material, the 28-page rider provides many new laughs. Such as:
* “Apparently Iggy met that Ron Howard once,” Grain noted in a section about the band’s stage plan. “You know, the ugly, baldy one out of Happy Days. Directs films. Got one of those faces you’d never get tired of punching.”
* In addition to the longstanding demand for the provision of a Bob Hope impersonator, Iggy & Co. ask promoters for “Seven dwarves, dressed up as those dwarves out of that marvelous Walt Disney film about the woman who goes to 
sleep for a hundred years after biting a poisoned dwarf, or maybe pricking her finger on a rather sharp apple… or something.” In a pinch, “Taller people are acceptable, of course. It’s attitude, more than altitude that’s important here,” Grain notes, adding, “Don’t forget the pointy hats!”
* If the dwarves or the Hope impersonator are not available, “we will settle for a belly dancer. In fact, she can use my belly to dance on,” advises Grain.
* Eric Fischer, the band’s road manager, “would like to acquire some pins, or badges” from the country in which the band is playing, Grain writes. Fischer needs the items “so he can stick them on his tour jacket and look like a big YMCA power walker.” The pins/badges request is then immediately retracted in the rider, allowing Grain to go off on a tangent about badgers, moles, and cattle TB.
* Along with packages of sliced cheese, roast beef, turkey, and ham (“sliced directly off a pig’s bottom”), promoters must outfit the band’s dressing room with a “bottle of extremely hot pepper sauce so that no one has to actually taste the sliced ham, turkey, beef and cheese that’s come out of the packaged containers.”
* One backstage requirement that remains in the band’s rider involves the provision of an English language newspaper like The New York Times or The Miami Herald. While Grain writes that his favorite read is the British daily The Guardian, he will settle for “a copy of USA Today that’s got a story about morbidly obese people in it. Most amusing!”
While acknowledging that “some people have been saying very nice things about this rider,” the modest Grain notes that the attention has him feel “a bit of a fraud,” since the document “was actually ghost-written for me. I merely took dictation---from a ouija board!” (28 pages)
